— CHAPTER SIX: Liquid Metal —

The Brigadier General practically choked on his coffee. He hooked the hot
sipper to his desk-station — a reflex action, from years of working in
freefall like this. "How the hell did it get past the gate guard in one piece?"

"The details are a bit erratic, sir," the young Lieutenant replied. He snorted
derisively. "They've been customs inspectors for so long I think they've
forgotten how to fight. I can't be sure I'm interpreting this correctly, but
it sounds like they're saying the intruder made transit at . . . at
five permil."

"That's what they claim, sir," the Lieutenant answered. He punched a few keys.
"The radar log they attached to their message — ooh. Ouch. They weren't
kidding, sir. The intruder really was travelling at 5 permil. And
pulling some pretty strong evasive maneuvers. This log only shows one minute's
worth of records, but for that entire time their doppler radar confirms that it
was pulling a hundred g in various random directions."

"Damn," the General muttered under his breath. Defensive doctrine had been
built around the notion that, since civilian spacecraft transited hyper holes
slowly to avoid boundary shear, a military intruder would likely do the same.
There had been some naysayers in high command who'd claimed that it was
possible for fighters, or even big bulky carriers, to line up precisely enough
with a hyper hole from far enough away that they could get a running start and
still make it through intact. Their concerns had generally been voted down, of
course; but just to throw them a bone, contingency plans had been developed to
permit a Gate Guard to lock onto and destroy craft moving as fast as a full 1
permil. That was 300 kilometers per second. Surely, at such a breakneck speed,
the chances the intruder would accidentally cripple itself on the way through
would have far outweighed the increased odds of slipping past an enemy Gate
Guard unharmed. But even that hadn't placated the alarmists. So, despite all
good sense, the high command invested in targeting systems that allowed each
Gate Guard's weapons to hit suddenly-appearing targets going twice that
fast, at a ridiculous 2 permil. It was sheer, wasteful overkill, and everyone
with a working brain knew it.

And yet, here was an Alpha Centaurian intruder — and it had to be a
fighter, given its acceleration — who'd just whizzed into the Sol
system going two-and-a-half times that speed. The damn xorns had just
proven, in frightening fashion, that they had a high-speed guidance system that
could indeed thread the needle with far more accuracy than they had any right
to. The entire Gate Guard system had just been rendered obsolete.

The Brigadier General grunted, then shook his head and returned his attention
to his Lieutenant: "What's the bogey's course?"

"Uh . . . at last count, it looks like the craft was pulling a
hundred-g powered turn. Best estimated trajectory is that it's going to
be headed straight toward us."

"They're attacking Station Jove?" the General puzzled. "With one fighter?
They've got to be kidding. The xorns must be testing our defenses. Ah well," he
turned to a young curly-haired woman at another station, "Put us on condition
yellow, Sergeant, we're going to have company in a day or so."

"Right, sir," Sergeant Li replied. She hailed from North Mars and, like most
North Martians, was Chinese. She was also one of the few that had learned how
to speak Mandarin — though not well enough to have a convincing accent,
since precious few still kept regional languages alive. She switched on the
intercom and engaged the corridor lights. "All personnel, yellow alert. I
repeat, yellow alert. This is not a drill . . ."

Deep in the yawning gulf between the Sol/Alpha-Centauri hyper hole and Jupiter,
the semi-intelligent electronic brain aboard the lone fighter went meticulously
through its battle projections. This pre-programmed powerhouse could withstand
accelerations that would have turned any living occupants into paste, and its
hot-fusion engines provided it with all the thrust it could use. Although it
had its own arsenal of weapons and could perform any number of sophisticated
battle maneuvers, fighters often inflicted the greatest devastation on
stationary targets simply by ramming them. Much debate within military circles
had centered on whether there was really any difference at all between a
fighter and a guided missile, especially given the near-S.I. level of smarts
the most recent generation of cruise missiles posessed. The only concensus
anyone had ever reached was that a spacecraft was a fighter, and not a cruise
missile, if it was cheaper to reuse than to expend.

Suicide ramming was not, however, in this particular fighter's primary mission
programming. This time.

Orbiting Jupiter so close it nearly touched its outer atmosphere, Station Jove
bristled to life. The station itself — nicknamed Cape Jovial by its
inhabitants — was little more than a vast skeletal framework of docking
clamps and conduits, barely armed and scarcely armored. Its military might, and
importance, came from the enormous fleet of spacecraft docked there. Sol's
military had rightly determined, long ago, that every heavy object in space
could be turned into a deadly missile, capable of smashing any fixed
installation to rubble with little effort. The only defense was to keep all
equipment and supplies mobile. Even fuel storage tanks were absent from Station
Jove's main structure, deuterium instead being supplied by a flotilla of
lumbering Transmute-Tanker spacecraft that made regular runs to and from the
Jovian atmosphere.

Now, with the alert having sounded, crews scrambled to make every docked
spacecraft voyage-ready. So long as the yellow alert lasted, they had to be
ready at a moment's notice to undock themselves and scatter from their home.
One by one, the fuel tankers, fighter carriers, personnel transports, and other
assorted craft came to life and reported in.

"We've got three no-goes, sir," the Sergeant reported. "Tanker eleven and Bus
Juliet are both down for maintenance, and their Commanders say they're not
spaceworthy. The old carrier Mercury's completely mothballed, of course.
Everyone else reports ready to head out."

"Okay," the General clapped and rubbed his hands together as he turned to his
tactical board. "Options! Ragaji, who can we send?"

Major Ragaji, the chief tactical officer, scanned the board and replied,
"There're six carriers here, sir. Two of them are already undocked for
patrolling."

The general snorted, looking at the labels on the big screen. "Send Zelta out
with orders to intercept and destroy. Keep the other deployers in reserve, this
might be a diversion."

"Right, sir," Ragaji responded; then, tapping the tiny blip on the screen
labelled Zelta, he selected target and mission and sent the dispatch on
its way.

A scant few kilometers away, the narrow radio beam carrying those orders landed
on a parabolic receiver dish. They could get away with using beamed radio at
such a short distance; if they'd wanted the signal to cross more than a few
million kilometers of interplanetary space error-free, they'd have had to use
an ultraviolet laser instead. A deployer needed to be able to receive new
orders at those kinds of distances, if it was to carry its fighters throughout
the Solar system.

"We're up!" Colonel Yindras called out. The air in the cramped Command Center,
deep in Zelta's armored heart, went tense. "The intruder's ours! Take us out
and clear, one gee."

"Right, sir," the pilot replied, throttling the QC&C engine smoothly upward
until it produced a steady 9.8 meters per second squared. The back end of the
spacecraft was now down.

Fighter deployers — sometimes called fighter carriers, sometimes called
mobile bases — existed as a consequence of the two main, competing engine
technologies. If you wanted to intercept an intruder or slip past a defender,
you needed to out-accelerate him, which led to a quickly-spiralling arms race
of more and more powerful spacecraft engines. Living flesh had a nasty tendency
to squish if you subjected it to more than a dozen or so times Earth's surface
gravity, so eventually the human factor was removed from the equation entirely,
and unmanned fighting vessels became every nation's front line soldiers.
Electronics were toughened to withstand the dozens upon dozens of g,
struts and stresspoints were built out of sturdier and sturdier alloys, fuel
hoses became fuel girders, but there was one fundamental conundrum in
spacecraft design that no amount of engineering could overcome, and that was
the hot-fusion engine's voracious appetite for fuel. An unmanned fighter
couldn't waste mass on a super-efficient QC&C fusion engine, because
despite their efficiency such engines had a positivley abyssmal thrust-to-mass
ratio; half the spacecraft would have to be engine just to get a meager 40 or
50g of acceleration. By contrast, even the tiniest proton-deuteron
hot-fusion engines could produce ungodly levels of thrust, but had barely 40%
of a QC&C engine's exhaust speed. And thanks to the bitter reality of
Tsielkovsky's equations, a 60% reduction in exhaust velocity translated to
many, many times the amount of fuel required for a given mission. A
modern fighter was little more than an armored flying tub, carrying more mass
in fuel than the all the rest of the spacecraft put together.

Which meant, ultimately, that it was far more efficient to tow a fighter
via a low thrust QC&C engine, than to have it fly there on its own. A
fighter deployer did just that. It carried fighters, their fuel, their
ammunition, their repair and maintenance crews, spare parts, and all the
tactical capability necessary to send its fighters into battle and retrieve the
survivors at battle's end. And since these deployers made such tempting
strategic targets, they also carried their own layers of whipple armor and
their own small arsenal of defensive weaponry.

The Colonel turned to his chief tactical officer. "What's our target's current
distance and vector?"

"Uh . . ." the Lieutenant took a moment to get his bearings, "Latest
report shows the intruder at three-eight-zero million kay-em, vector
three-five-nine by plus zero Ecliptic — almost straight toward us."

Yindras nodded. The Sol/Alpha-Centauri hyper hole, from whence their attacker
had winked into existence, had its own crazy orbit around the sun. It was the
first linked hyper hole ever made, and its creators on Sol's end were so
worried about making their experiment work that they didn't give any thought to
where it would end up years down the line. Every eleven years, it grazed the
outer edge of the asteroid belt, then five-and-a-half years later it was more
than a full A.U. farther out than Jupiter. In some thousands of years, in fact,
it would meet Jupiter and send a huge swath of that gas-giant's interior
into the Alpha Centauri A system as it passed through. That would be a
sight to behold. Right now, though, the hole was about a quarter of an orbit
ahead of Jupiter, as it had been for the past year or so. Any attacker that
made it past Sol's Alpha Centauri gate guard would have to cross that
two-and-a-half A.U. gap to reach Station Jove.

That position report on the intruder was also, of necessity, out-of-date. 380
million klicks was over twenty light-minutes. That blip on his tactical
officer's thermal-infrared scope showed where their prey used to be
twenty-one minutes ago, not where it was now.

"When we're out of Cape Jovial's hazard zone," the Colonel addressed his remote
ops officer, "Deploy Zelta Cee and Zelta Dee. Order them to engage and destroy
the target. We'll hold Zeltas Aay and Bee in reserve on the off-chance the
enemy makes it through."

Captain Ganges, the remote ops officer, furrowed her brow. "Zelta Dee, sir?
D'you really trust it with a live target?"

"We've gotta give the new Directional a real shakedown some time,"
Colonel Yindras answered. Of the carriers stationed at Jupiter, Zelta was the
Solar Space Force's premier Guinea pig. Its fighters served as a test bed for
every harebrained experiment in military technology that the politicos saw fit
to see in action. Nowhere was this more evident than with Zelta Dee's
frighteningly new Directional Screen. Some yahoo in a lab had managed to tweak
the collumators normally used in a magnetic snare so that they could project a
short-range continuous field along a single narrow arc. If the fighter could
aim this projector directly at an attacker, the field would offer far
more resistance to charged particle weapons than the omnidirectional magnetic
protection field most combat spacecraft used. If turned up high enough, it
could even, in theory, nudge incoming ferromagnetic slugs and shrapnel so that
an otherwise direct-hit would be reduced to a grazing blow or even miss the
fighter entirely. The directional screen had worked fine in the laboratory, and
in one or two controlled tests against stationary spaceborne guns, but it had
never seen combat. Worse, it would interfere with its fighter's more
conventional magnetic protection field, so both systems couldn't operate at the
same time. If the directional screen wasn't between the attacker and the target
at the instant a plasma burst arrived, the target would have nothing but its
whipple armor to keep its electronic guts alive.

Station Jove's hazard zone, inside of which all thrust levels and exhaust
vectors had to be carefully controlled, extended for five hundred kilometers
in all directions. At Zelta's modest one g of acceleration from a
standing start, it would take a little over five minutes before they were
clear. In that time, the fighters' support crews would have to make their final
checks to ensure that their charges were fully loaded, armed, sealed, and ready
for action. At this moment, three crewmembers were out in compression suits,
inspecting and adjusting two problem spots on Zelta Dee's armored surfaces that
the robots couldn't reach, and a similar cranny on the surface of Zelta Aay.
The steady 1g thrust from Zelta's engine meant they had to cling to the
sides of the fighters like rock climbers on a sheer cliff face, and still make
it back to one of the safe zones on Zelta's hull in the five minutes before
fighter deployment — all routine.

The very name "fighter" was deceptive to any student of aviation; these were
not the tiny winged needles of air-to-air dogfighting, but enormous armored
cylinders sixty meters across and a couple hundred meters long, weighing in at
over a hundred thousand tonnes apiece without fuel. Aside from their engine
bells and their separate internal fuel tanks for hydrogen and deuterium, most
of their bulk was taken up by layer upon layer of metal armor. Each layer of
armor had to be separated from its neighbors by a wide vacuum gap, to ensure
that if the outer layer got hit by something hard enough to make it explode,
the next layer in would only take a diffuse spray of vaporized debris. It was
the same basic principle that protected satellites from micrometeors, or that
protected the old seagoing aircraft carriers from being sunk by a single
torpedo. So many layers were sandwiched on top of each other that the actual
functioning hardware at each fighter's core was barely half the fighter's full
diameter. The outermost layer, also, had to be polished to a mirrorlike shine,
in case its attacker sported lasers. The same kind of octuple-decker
armor-vacuum sandwich also protected Zelta itself, should its enemies somehow
get past its four fighters.

With all inspectors in and the hazard zone at last behind them, Captain Ganges
called out, "Clear and safe! Remote S.I.'s showing green. Zelta Cee and Zelta
Dee, deploying!" Two enormous hydraulic clamp ensembles released their cargoes
in unison, their clangs and thuds echoing reassuringly through the Command
Center. Two dark video monitors flared into life — windows were
impossible this deep inside the carrier — showing two gleaming patchwork
cylinders falling away and behind them. For a brief instant, the logo of the
Solar Federal Government, emblazoned on a tiny corner of Zelta Dee's outermost
armor, flashed in the distant light of Sol herself. Ganges turned to Colonel
Yindras and asked, "Confirm attack and destroy orders for Cee and Dee against
intruder, sir?"

"Confirmed," Yindras intoned. "Gun him down."

Ganges grinned wryly, and typed the shorthand command at her console. She could
have just told the fighters what to do in plain language — their S.I.s
were more than sophisticated enough to understand — but there was a
certain thrill and comfort in writing out their orders in their ambiguity-free
native tongue. Each fighter's S.I. was a temperamental prima donna with
its own subtle quirks; shorthand commands helped cut down on misunderstandings
tremendously. Acknowledgement of her orders came back in a heartbeat, delayed
only by the split instant needed to encrypt and decrypt the signals. This was
the last time she'd have the luxury of instant communication until the battle
was over. "Orders sent, sir."

Even before their orders had been issued, each of the two fighters had already
spooled up its main engine for the moment it would be needed. Now, nearly a
kilometer behind Zelta, each began feeding hydrogen and deuterium into that
aft-facing pressure-furnace at twenty tonnes per second. Engine bells flared
into superheated brilliance. Frames shook, joints creaked and groaned,
components sagged, until at last they reached full throttle at a hundred times
the force of Earth's surface gravity. No living thing could survive such
crushing environs. They overtook their carrier almost instantly and sped off
toward their prey, a tiny thermal blip nearly a thousand times farther away
from them than the Moon was from the Earth.

On her forward video monitor, Captain Ganges watched the two powerhouses pull
away and vanish into the distance. She'd seen it countless times before, in one
training exercise after another, but this time her charges were going after
live prey that could shoot back. In many ways, those fighters were like her
children, and she worried that they might not be coming home again. It all
depended on whether their S.I.s chose the right combat algorithms at the right
times to outplay the intruder.

Inside Zelta Dee's semi-intelligent electronic brain, these scenarios were
already playing out in mock battles. As this was a two-fighter operation, one
of them had to be chosen as the master coordinator; this time it was Zelta
Dee's turn. When the time came for decisive action, Dee would have to send the
order to Cee to split up or stay tight. That wouldn't happen for a while,
though. If they and their target both accelerated toward one another until they
were closing at 10 permil relative — which would take at least another
twenty-five minutes in and of itself — their rendezvous wouldn't happen
for at least another thirty-one hours. If the target changed its acceleration
vector, either to change targets or to run, that figure would be higher, but
not much higher. And it had nowhere to run to, except back to the
hyper hole, where it would be easy prey for the Gate Guard.

With the data coming in from Zelta Dee's passive sensors, though — the
target's angular location, its blue shift, the brightness of its exhaust plume
at six diffferent infrared frequencies, etc. — the intruder was still
accelerating directly toward Station Jove in an utterly predictable manner when
the light left it 19 minutes ago. When Cee and Dee's radar echoes finished
their round trip — assuming the target wasn't running with Active Radar
Absorption — they'd refine their radial velocity measurements and add
cross-section and distance snapshots to this data.

Thus began the waiting game. . . .

Although the Centaurian fighter didn't intend to suicide ram, its
mission was still more or less a suicide mission. Its carrier, named Gellimand
after the Centaurian personification of light, was back on the other side of
the Sol/Alpha-Centauri hyper hole, and had no intention of risking itself or
its crew just to get its number 3 fighter back. Gellimand 3 had rolled the dice
blasting through the hole past Sol's Gate Guard, and would roll the dice
several more times before its mission was accomplished. Being lucky enough to
survive the trip back, especially when the Gate Guard could see it coming, was
almost out of the question. It kept its throttle steady at 100g, even as
it registered the distant flares of two enemy fighter launches that were
doubtlessly heading its way.

After 25 minutes, Zelta Cee and Zelta Dee had both accelerated to 5 permil. The
enemy fighter, likewise, had completed its powered turn so that it was now
moving 5 permil straight toward the Zelta fighters — at least per the
18+-minute-old signals that had reached the Zeltas by this point. That made the
closing speed a comfortable 10 permil relative. Zelta Cee and Zelta Dee both
throttled their engines down to their ready-idle states, and watched their
target to see what it would do.

Their target continued to accelerate. This was half expected. The target was
probably looking to avoid fighter confrontations along the way to its goal. By
the time the Centaurian fighter's engines finally cut out 25 minutes later, it
was closing on Station Jove at 10 permil, which meant that the Zelta fighters
were now closing at 15 permil relative. That bumped their meeting time up to a
scant 22 hours from now. If they wanted to match speed with the enemy at
rendezvous, they'd have to cancel all their forward velocity and
accelerate twice as much in retrograde — a 75-minute burn at 100g
— so that all three of them would be hurtling toward Station Jove at 10
permil when they engaged each other. Combined with the 25-minute burn they'd
just completed, this would eat up fully half of their delta-v budget.

And if their target tried some tricky maneuvers to get them to burn up even
more of their fuel, or actually accelerated toward them . . .

There was another option. Since they were two fighters, one of them could
keep closing at high speed without slowing down, or at least without slowing
down as much, and make a pass at the enemy on the way by. The odds of success
on such a strafing attack were less than stellar, but they were better than the
odds if their rendezvous missed. So . . . they'd both start
decelerating when the time came, and if the enemy didn't pull anything fancy to
try and elude them, they'd both make a velocity-matching rendezvous with the
target. If it did, though, Zelta Dee would continue to attempt a rendezvous,
while Zelta Cee would merely do enough of a deceleration burn to neutralize the
5 permil of outward speed it had relative to Station Jove. The target would
whiz by Cee at ten permil — or more — and, luck willing, it would
run into something Cee threw in its path.

Some 21 hours after starting out and twenty million kilometers from the
intruder, Zelta Cee and Zelta Dee pointed their engines directly at the
oncoming Centaurian fighter and throttled back up to 100g. It was
still only a radar blip and a tiny point on their thermal scanners at this
moment, and would have been utterly invisible to the naked human eye —
were there any humans nearby to look. But at the insane rate the target
was closing with them, Zelta Dee needed ten million kilometers just to match
its current speed. If the intruder decided to accelerate toward
them, they could use up the entire 20-million-klick runway lying before their
target.

And since they were now decelerating, it was time to release the cruise
missiles.

Sixty-seven seconds later, Gellimand 3 saw the launches and the engine
telltales. The cruise missiles would be easy to deal with, but if those
two fighters both managed a rendezvous, they'd probably kill it. Thermal
decoys weren't an option; a fighter's vast surface area meant it dumped a lot
of low-temperature blackbody radiation into space. For one of those tiny
spheres to match such a bright-but-low-frequency thermal profile, its emitters
would consume enough power to produce their own heat signature with its
own peak frequency. No, if Gellimand 3 was going to make it through this,
its only recourse was to accelerate toward its ultimate target, and hope its
attackers wouldn't have enough run-up room to match speed. It pointed
its nose straight at Station Jove, and drove its main engine up to full power.

And sixty-six seconds after that, the Zelta fighters saw the intruder
start accelerating toward them. It was decided. After 5 permil of
100g deceleration, Zelta Cee would cut its engine, leaving it with the
bulk of its delta-v budget unburned but with the attacker hurtling toward it at
10 permil relative or more. Zelta Dee would make a rendezvous, and hope
the intruder didn't force it to burn so much fuel that it would no
longer be able to return to its carrier.

Gellimand 3 had cut its engine after five permil of acceleration. It
would be enough. One of its attackers had throttled back, reducing its
threat to a single impending high-speed pass; the other was still furiously
burning away its fuel supply in a mad attempt to match speeds. In fifteen
minutes that first fighter's high-speed pass would arrive, but for now
Gellimand 3 had its mechanized hands full with the cruise missiles. It
throttled up to the full 100g and commenced evasive maneuvers.
Titanic attitude thrusters, each a small hot-fusion engine in its own right,
fishtailed the fighter randomly so as to throw the missiles off.

They were tracking it, as Gellimand 3's S.I. had expected. Each little
blue-shifted blip appeared motionless against the background stars, no matter
which way the fighter's engine pointed. As dangerous as that made the missiles
to Gellimand 3, it also made them easy prey for point defense. Gellimand 3
sported several short-range proton cannons which, at high power, could blind a
fighter's radar if captured by a magnetic field or vaporize a few layers of its
armor if not.

The name "proton cannon" was somewhat of a misnomer. A beam of nothing
but protons would carry such a strong electrostatic charge that its own
self-repulsion would spread the beam out a hundred meters wide in a
microsecond. Instead, an equal number of electrons were mixed back in at the
last instant, just before the beam left its muzzle. The resulting
proton/electron bolt was, technically, an electrically neutral plasma; though
at its relativistic muzzle velocity, calling it a "plasma weapon" hardly did it
justice. Even at low power, a single "proton" burst could punch through a
missile's thin casing and scramble its electronics, if it hit close to dead
center. Firing such a proton burst also required the ejection of a lot less
material than, say, a slug launcher or point-defense gun with the same kinetic
energy — a vital concern when you had to carry ever gram of mass onboard
with you. Still under 100g evasive maneuvering, the fighter's S.I.
trained a proton cannon on each incoming blip, and let loose in low-power
rapid-burst mode. One by one, each missile's tracking failed, turning it into
an unguided slug.

Not that an unguided slug wasn't still a danger. At 20 permil relative, a
half-tonne impactor would do more damage than a thermonuclear bomb. But now,
the chance of an impact was too remote to worry about. Each dead missile
flashed past harmlessly on its way out of the Solar system.

The first Sol fighter itself would be tougher. It could unleash several of its
weapons all at once, all timed to arrive at the instant it rushed past.
Gellimand 3 would need a healthy dose of luck and defensive posturing to
survive the encounter. Its S.I. throttled the engine back to idle, and counted
down the minutes as its first attacker approached.

At one minute, with the Sol fighter a scant 270 000 kilometers away,
Gellimand 3's engine flared back into life at its full 100g as it
resumed evasive maneuvers. Sol's aresenal boasted few, if any, charged particle
weapons — their top brass favored the punch of kinetics — but just
to be on the safe side, Gellimand 3 also fed power into its superconducting
magnets, surrounding its armored cylindrical shell with a magnetic field strong
enough to capture an incoming charged particle or plasma burst and hurl it
harmlessly aside.

Zelta Cee was expecting all this. At such close range, the light-speed delay
between one side's action and the other side noticing the action was less than
a second; the dynamic had shifted from a pondering chess game to a
lightning-quick fencing match. Zelta Cee, though, had brought along a kind of
main-gauche to supplement the epée of its conventional arsenal. Like its
younger sister Dee, Zelta Cee also sported an experimental piece of hardware,
though not one as game-changing as the former's Directional Screen. It carried
a bulky honeycomb of grazing-incidence mirrors embedded in a recessed cavity in
its armor, known simply as the Radiation Gun. A tiny puff of antimatter was fed
into the core and annihilated, and the myriad mirrors focused the resulting
gamma rays until they converged to a spotlight-like beam. If Zelta Cee were
lucky, the gamma rays would knock scads of electrons loose from the target's
armor, and its "protective" magnetic field would turn the particle shower into
an electromagnetic pulse inside its own circuitry.

But the Radiation Gun would only get one shot in this battle. By the time it
recharged, the intruder would be far behind Zelta Cee and dwindling into the
unapproachable distance. Best to wait until the moment of closest approach. In
the meantime, it was time to let loose with short-range missiles.

Gellimand 3's thermal sensors caught all six launches. Its proton cannons once
again erupted in burst after low-power burst, hoping to wreck the tracking of
these short-range threats the way they'd done for the cruise missiles. It
wouldn't be able to keep this up for long; though proton cannons consumed no
"ammunition," they required current pulses so intense they could only be
provided by battle capacitors, and those took over a minute to fully
recharge. They were also notoriously inefficient, which meant they got
hot. A fighter could only dump heat into its exhaust so fast. Gellimand
3 watched the engines die one-by-one on four of the six bandits before
overheating shut two of its proton cannons down. The remaining cannons finished
off the fifth missile, and then the last, with barely a coulomb left to spare
in the capacitors.

And at that moment, Zelta Cee was upon it.

As the Sol fighter passed within ten thousand kilometers of its
Alpha-Centaurian target — close enough for a wrestling bout or a
slow-dance — Gellimand 3's high-energy photon counters registered an
intense gamma ray spike coming from its attacker's direction. Nuclear ordnance?
No, the frequency range was too narrow; it had to be antimatter. Odd, the
thermal sensors and radar had detected no launches. Had antimatter ordnance
detonated on its attacker's hull? Or in it? Its engine was still on
full, correcting its course as though a thinking mind were behind it. If an
antimatter explosion had gone off inside it, neither its engine nor its
S.I. was affected. Whatever had happened, Gellimand 3 had just taken a
big gamma ray jolt, strong enough to induce electrical currents in its
armor. This would have been enough to fry its microcircuitry . . .
but as luck would have it, the brunt of the burst landed on its nose. It was
carrying a lot of iron in its nose, which shielded its innards just
enough.

There was more iron in Gellimand 3's nose than any normal fighter would have
any use for, in fact. But the S.I. would save that for later.

As the attacker shot past, fast enough to cross a continent every second,
another missile barrage followed. At this range, there was no time to knock out
their guidance; Gellimand 3 could only hope to dodge. It pointed its nose as
far away from the missiles' all-too-short trajectory as it could, and hoped
that those launches had been intended for a target disoriented by the gamma ray
burst. They were. Imbued with their launch platform's own dizzying speed, the
missiles needed the full thrust of their own engines just to rendezvous with
their target's predicted location. Gellimand 3's last-instant engine burn had
pushed it out of the range of all of them . . . save one. The last
missile nicked the rear quarter at a shallow angle, turning itself and two
layers of armor into incandescent vapor that spalled sideways and, briefly,
glittered in the dark. Gellimand 3 now had a furrow three meters wide dug into
its flank, but that was it. It had escaped the encounter virtually unharmed.

As Zelta Cee's S.I. watched its target hurtle past, still functional and
dangerous, it only knew that the Radiation Gun didn't score a kill. It would be
chalked up as yet another failed field test of yet another experimental weapon.
Zelta Cee throttled its main engine up to a low-powered cruise acceleration of
2g, and lumbered toward home defeated.

The intruder could now turn its attention to the other fighter, due to arrive
in another forty minutes or so. There would be no dodging of a single fast pass
with this one. It was braking, and would be able to rendezvous regardless of
how hard Gellimand 3 did, or didn't, accelerate. It would have all the time it
needed to fire weapons until its target was dead. There would be no running.
The only way Gellimand 3 could survive the coming encounter would be to kill
its attacker first.

Zelta Dee slowed — or rather, accelerated — until the gap between
itself and the intruder converged at the snail's pace of a single permil, a
mere 300 kilometers per second. In all that time, the intruder had
launched no cruise missiles at it. It must have known that avoiding a
fight with Zelta Dee was impossible long before now, so either the Centaurian
fighter was saving its ammo or its mission package didn't include any cruise
missiles to begin with. Now, the range was coming up on the two hundred
thousand kilometer mark, the knife-fighting point-plank range needed for both
sides' short-range weapons.

Gellimand 3 carried no fragmentation missiles. These were only useful
against an unarmored spacecraft that might be able to dodge a projectile
as it closed in; neither the Sol fighters it would have to blast its way
through, nor its ultimate target, fit that description. Against the
60-meter-wide cylinder closing on it, only a missile that stayed in one piece
'til the instant of impact would have a chance of punching through all those
layers of whipple armor. Gellimand 3's S.I. selected three short-range
kinetic missiles from its arsenal and belched them forth.

With less than a light-second between itself and its target, Zelta Dee spotted
the launches almost the moment they happened. Instantly, its
point-defense batteries flowered to life, locking on to each incoming radar
blip and spitting out hypervelocity slugs, each no bigger than a
housefly. Two of the three Centaurian missiles met with one of these tiny
metal darts and went dark, their dead guidance hardware dooming them to the
last course-correction they'd applied. The third, though, managed to
slalom through the hail of projectiles and correct for Zelta Dee's
erratic jinking sufficiently to drive itself home. In the brief instant
before impact, Dee's S.I. concluded that it wouldn't be able to get out of the
way. It focused its Directional Screen on the incoming ordnance and
poured power into it from its battle capacitors.

And, apparently, this was sufficient. The multimegatesla megnetic field
projected before Zelta Dee shoved just hard enough on the missile to nudge it
off course, and turn a solid hit into a miss.

Gellimand 3's S.I. tried to digest this odd bit of data. Kinetic missile
number two followed a perfect track for a direct hit, yet there was no sign of
impact. The enemy fighter's engine continued to burn at 100g
thrust level, and its thrust vector continued to gyrate exactly the way a
fighter performing evasive maneuvers would. The enemy was still intact,
and could decide to shoot back at any time. It might even be
immune to kinetic missiles. This was bad. It was time to
haul out the secret weapon.

Zelta Dee dumped the heat from that last capacitor discharge into its exhaust
stream while it recharged them, and ran through its firing options.
There was still enough power in the capacitors for its slug launchers or a
couple of its proton cannons; in some seconds the capacitors would be charged
enough for a full proton spread. It could hammer the target with
short-range missiles in the meantime, though the supply of those was
harshly limited; even Zelta, its carrier a hundred million klicks behind it,
only had enough missiles onboard to restock each of its fighters once.
But . . . what was that new thermal anomaly on the target's
nose? It showed a classic blackbody curve peaking at 970 nm; that would
make it white-hot, nearly 3000 Kelvins. The target was dumping a
lot of heat into something other than its exhaust. And —

Slug launch detection! Something just erupted from the target
toward Zelta Dee, going much faster than the target itself. It
was the thermal anomaly; the white-hot blip on the target's hull was now a
white-hot kinetic slug, hurtling toward Dee at fifteen permil relative.
It was distant enough, though, that Dee's continued evasive maneuvering should
easily put the fighter out of harm's way. Except . . . was it
maneuvering somehow? Impossible. No electronic guidance
system could withstand the multimegagee slam of even the gentlest slug
launch. But . . . there it was, its encroaching profile
unmoving against the background stars, altering its course to match Dee's every
bob and weave. Zelta Dee's S.I. reclassified it as a high-speed missile,
and opened fire with its point-defense guns. The hail of point-defense
fire registered direct hit after direct hit, but . . . the white-hot
missile didn't stop tracking! At last, unable to kill the attacker
or get out of its way, Zelta Dee pointed its Directional Screen straight at it,
applied every watt of power the screen could withstand, and hoped for the best.

And, per standard procedure when faced with an unknown, the S.I. beamed all
the data it had on this strange weapon back to its carrier, six light-minutes
away.

As the hot threat crossed the last 4500 kilometers — the final second of
its terminal flight path — Zelta Dee's S.I. carefully monitored the
Directional Screen. The wattage now being fed into it was right at the
bleeding edge of its design limits. Were it an established technology
that had been stress tested under repeated worst-case conditions, being at the
top end of its power envelope wouldn't be an issue; but this was a prototype,
and it was a terrible risk to push it this hard. The S.I. focused its
full attention on every telltale sensor attached to the Screen, ready to reduce
power the instant any value started to deviate. None of them did
. . . but right in the last few milliseconds, to the S.I.'s great
alarm, the Screen was pivoting so as to face a different
direction! It had to be brought back on track, and fast. What had
caused — why was it pointed at the enemy fighter, and not at the —

A fighter's S.I., like a human's brain, was built in layers. The topmost
cognitive layer made the command decisions, while a couple dozen unintelligent
layers sitting below it ran those autonomous functions that needed digital
attention. To minimize its response time, the aiming of the Directional
Screen was under the command of one such low-level layer. Gellimand 3, as
it turned out, had decided to supplement its attack by firing three proton
bursts timed to reach the target near the moment of impact, and one of them had
arrived a little early. It had been a better decision for Gellimand 3
than it knew — for, with all the evasive maneuvering the secret weapon
had been tracking its target through, the proton bursts arrived at their target
from a different angle than the secret weapon did. The low-level
autonomous layer controlling Zelta Dee's Directional Screen received sensor
data telling it that a proton burst from the enemy fighter's direction had just
whizzed by, dangerously close to the hull. Proton bursts were a known and
understood threat; the white-hot something closing in was an
unknown. So, it swung the Directional Screen to face the enemy fighter
from whence the proton burst had come.

It was a software glitch. It would probably be ironed out in the next
iteration.

For a split-second, Zelta Dee knew it was doomed. It had kept its comm laser
pointed toward its distant carrier throughout the battle, sending constant
updates of its position, the target's position, detector readings, decisions
made, and decisions not made — all for the benefit of its human masters.
Once, when it had had the time and bandwidth to spare, it had sent its
wide-eyed, almost poetic musings on the way the starlight danced in its
detectors while its hundred thousand tonne metal body gyrated in evasive
maneuvers. Now, it packed as much data as it could about this last blunder,
this fatal flaw in its screen's software, into the few bits it had time to
transmit.

And as it sang its swansong into the void, watching helplessly while its screen
override took hold too late, the white-hot missile struck home.

The impact happened faster than any accelerometers could register it.
Armor failure sensors blared their cascading alarms for a few brief
microseconds; then the fighter's electronic brains and guts, buried deeply in
its core, failed faster than they could assess what was happening — until
at last there was no S.I. to do the assessing.

A little over a hundred million kilometers away, and six minutes in the future,
the last ultraviolet gasps of Zelta Dee reached its carrier. Captain
Ganges watched in horror as the last instants of the battle were recreated
before her eyes. She rubbed her face for a second to clear her
focus. "Colonel! Zelta Dee's gone dark!"

"It lost the fight?!" Colonel Yindras scowled, moving to the Remote Ops
station to see for himself. He would have stomped there in his most
onerous march, but Zelta was idling now with its engine off, and it was hard
to move angrily in microgravity.

"The Centaurian fighter's got some kind of new weapon," Ganges continued.
"Details are sketchy at this point, but from its behavior, it . . .
well, I'd call it a homing slug."

"Impossible," the Colonel quipped as he stared over her shoulder at her
display.

"Rrrrmmm," Ganges scanned the data again, "Well, there wasn't a lot of data
Zelta Dee could send us. Maybe I'm misinterpreting some of it. Maybe the slug
launch detection was a mistake, and there was really a missile cruising along
the same course as the fighter but going fifteen permil. But then Dee should
have picked it up a lot earlier, especially with how bright it was in the
near-infrared."

"Are you sure it was homing?" the Colonel asked.

"Positive. A blip doesn't stay put at the same angles with that much
evasive maneuvering going on, unless its changing course to track you while it
closes in."

The colonel turned back to his remote ops officer: "Do Aay and Bee have enough
running room to do a rendezvous intercept?"

Ganges furrowed her brow. "One-oh-eight million klicks, intruder's
inbound at fifteen permil relative . . . so yes. At
100g, our fighters would need only about 10 million klicks to match that
speed. But since the target's coming toward us, Aay and Bee would have to
accelerate away from the target and toward Station Jove, and ol'
Cape Jovial's barely one million klicks behind us. If we want the
rendezvous to happen before the enemy reaches Station Jove, they'll have
to accelerate toward the enemy first, then bleed off all that speed — the
delta-vee is going to be huge. They'll barely have enough juice to
brake to a stop afterward, let alone return to us."

"So we'll have to pick them up afterward," Yindras nodded. "Still better
than letting the intruder through."

"Unless the intruder decides to accelerate even more, after our fighters
reach their intercept speed," Ganges reminded him. "Then, a rendezvous
will deplete their fuel so badly they won't be able to stop. They'll keep
coasting right out of the solar system, unless we order them to crash into
Jupiter. And the enemy knows what the delta-vee budget of our
fighters is."

The colonel winced. If they'd sent Aay and Bee earlier, they'd have
enough of a lead that they wouldn't need to accelerate toward the
intruder before turning back the way they came to match speeds. He'd
dutifully followed the tactical doctrine of holding fighters in reserve 'til
you knew they'd be needed — and look at where that had gotten
them. They couldn't even guarantee a rendezvous with the enemy now.
The best they might be able to hope for was two high-speed passes — both
of which could end up missing the target, just like Zelta Cee had done.

Back at Station Jove, the Brigadier General fumed. "They've got to be
kidding! A single xorn fighter got past both our Gate Guard
and two of our own fighters?!"

"Looks that way, sir," the young Lieutenant answered. "They're claiming
it has some kind of new weapon."

"Did they give details?" the General growled.

"They're saying it's a —" the Lieutenant did a double-take "— a
missile fired from a slug launcher."

The General seemed genuinely alarmed. "Good lord. Samuels!"

"Yes sir?" barked a startled Major floating at the main weapons station.
He quickly hooked his feet through the securing footholds.

"Did Sol develop any contingency tactics, in case an enemy invented a missile
that could be launched at slug speed?"

"Uh . . ." Major Samuels nervously paged through one information
lookup after another. "I'm not seeing any . . . I'll have to
check the archives; they're not easy to search. They might've called the
contingency something obscure, that wouldn't show up if I searched for obvious
terms."

"Well, get on it. If the intruder's luck holds out, we're going to need
it. Let's hope Zelta's other two fighters can do some good."

Gellimand 3's S.I. expected a response like this, so it came as no surprise
when the two engine telltales arrived six minutes later. In that time, it
had already closed the gap to its ultimate target by another 1.6 million
kilometers. The two new thermal sources accelerating toward it at
100g were doubtlessly fighters, apparently launched by the same deployer
that had launched the first two adversaries. But if Gellimand 3
accelerated now, it could avoid a rendezvous entirely before it got within
close weapon range of Jupiter . . . unless Sol had invented some new
kind of fuel-heavy fighter with a higher-than-normal delta-v budget, or was
willing to sacrifice its fighters to a burnout trajectory that sent them into
interstellar space. The higher speed might also make targeting more
difficult. And, of course, it would put Gellimand 3 at the midway point
of its own delta-v budget; it was already closing with its target at
fifteen permil, and after accelerating to twenty permil it would take all of
its remaining fuel just to nullify that speed. Return would be
impossible. No matter, the S.I. really hadn't counted on surviving the
mission anyway. It was worth the risk. Gellimand 3 pointed its nose
straight at its destination and fired up its main engine again, pouring on the
acceleration.

Even though the intruder's engine was pointed away from Zelta Aay and Zelta
Bee, the glow of hot helium jetting out behind it was unmistakable. There
was nothing the two Sol fighters could do about it. Any chance of a
rendezvous vanished the moment that engine-flame registered on their
detectors; by now the enemy would have been barrelling toward them at full
thrust for the 6 minutes its engine-flame light had taken to reach them.
The two Zelta fighters resigned themselves to a single high-speed pass
each. They shut down their engines — they were already pulling
away from their carrier at 2.4 permil, no reason to waste more fuel — and
ran through their remaining options.

Assuming their target shut off its engines after 5 permil of extra
acceleration, they'd meet in a hair over four-and-a-half hours. Their
carrier would be 11.5 million kilometers behind them, and Station Jove —
whose defense was their number one priority — would be only a million
kilometers behind that. If Zelta Aay and Zelta Bee both missed, the
Station's remaining defenders would have only half an hour before the enemy
reached them. Ramming was unlikely — something in the fleet was
bound to knock out its maneuver capability in that last half hour
— but if it somehow made it through and lucked out on its course
targeting, its impact kinetic energy would be equal to 33 tonnes of
matter and antimatter. In the more likely event that the enemy was
knocked out before it could ram, the worst the defenders would have to contend
with was a volley of high-relative-velocity weapons fire . . .
similar to what Zelta Aay and Bee intended to throw at the intruder themselves.

They could try and ram the enemy on their one high-speed pass, which would
completely disintegrate all parties involved if successful, but the enemy's own
100g engine made it every bit as maneuverable as themselves. If
they homed in on it, it would get out of their way just as fast. But in
trying to ram, even if they failed, they might get close enough for a barrage
of kinetic slugs to secure a few lucky hits.

They waited.

Captain Ganges stared at her report screen in stunned disbelief. Then, she
pinched the bridge of her nose and winced. Nearly five hours of waiting, for
this?! "The encounter reports from Zeltas Aay and Bee are in, sir. The target
. . . remains active."

Colonel Yindras buried his face in his hands.

"They managed to score a few grazing hits with their slug guns on the way by,"
Ganges explained, "But that was it."

"So a few gashes in its armor, but otherwise the enemy is still inbound?"

Ganges breathed a heavy sigh. "Yes."

The Colonel was silent for a long moment. Then: "Well . . . we'd
better go pick up our fighters." He grimaced, then sneered. "We'll need them to
defend what's left of Station Jove after the intruder's done with it."

A million kilometers behind Zelta, the Brigadier General reacted nearly the
same way. "They didn't kill it," he announced to everyone in the room. "We've
got a live intruder just half an hour away." He addressed his young
curly-haired sergeant: "Put Station Jove on condition red."

The station's docked fleet had been at condition yellow for over a full day.
Now, weary from their heightened vigilance, the second stage alert klaxons
blared in the crews' ears. Taking turns in orderly coordination with the
station's traffic controllers, each craft that was still spaceworthy undocked
itself, moving far enough away from the station that it could run or fight at
an instant's notice when the attacker arrived.

"Do we still have the five other carriers from yesterday?" the General asked.

Major Ragaji checked the blips at the tactical board, then confirmed: "We've
got four, sir. Callistra got ordered to the Sirius hyper hole while you were
off duty."

"Tell them all to deploy," the General commanded. "Station Jove's
thrusters can move us out of the way of any impactor, but not if the threat
can home in on us. We need that xorn fighter neutralized!"

"Yes, sir!" Ragaji replied. He tapped each of the four carrier-colored blips
clustered near the station on his panel, sending dispatch packets to each of
them. Then just to be sure they understood, he picked up the microphone and
keyed an omnidirectional broadcast: "Attention Ghanima, Domya, Fulgra, and
Diana. All four of you are to attack and destroy the intruder. This is a
coordinated attack, so be sure your fighter groups don't step on each other.
Under no circumstances is the intruder to be alive within short weapons range
of Station Jove."

Ragaji glanced at his external displays. He didn't need magnification; 600
meters of polished metal armor would have been hard to miss even outside
the Station's hazard zone, and they wouldn't be that far away for another five
minutes. Four behemoths rose (or fell?) away on columns of invisible helium
exhaust. And in the distance ahead of them, barely visible against the
darkness, a tiny speck of blue-white light winked out. That would be the dying
embers of the intruder's hot-fusion engine as it throttled back to idle. The
Major's teeth clenched. That 100g flame had pushed the invader toward
their doorstep a day ago. The last light must have been left over from its
evasive maneuvers, when it somehow dodged every missile and slug that two whole
fighters had thrown at it.

Gellimand 3's S.I. saw the expected flurry of activity forty seconds later.
Four enemy fighter-deployers were on the move. That meant at least twelve, and
as many as twenty-four, fighters would be upon it soon. Jupiter's big space
station was probably throwing every military spacecraft it had into Gellimand
3's path. Even with its speed advantage, survival was now impossible. All that
mattered was getting within weapons range. Short weapons range would be
preferred, but there was no chance the defenders would allow that to
happen. Its last act would have to happen from over a million kilometers out.

Five minutes later and 1.8 million kilometers closer, seventeen tiny ringlets
of blue-white light added their glow to the oncoming vista. Those would be the
engine telltales from the Sol fighters, just launched, as they thrusted
directly toward Gellimand 3 at 100g. They could have launched cruise
missiles, but there would be little point; the homing electronics and other
fragile systems on a cruise missile imposed the same 100g acceleration
limit as on a fighter, and for exactly the same reason. If the 17 new targets
kept accelerating, and there was no reason to assume they wouldn't, they'd meet
Gellimand 3 in about 25 minutes, 1.1 million kilometers away from the ultimate
target.

Not optimal firing range, but close enough.

Gellimand 3 waited, for the last time.

Seventeen fighters, arranged in four flights per the carriers they'd launched
from, arrived right on schedule. Seventeen hundred-thousand-tonne steel
juggernauts, carrying more than that mass in unspent fuel, all faced down a
like-sized intruder they had to kill. They now stood toe-to-toe with
Gellimand 3, a mere three hundred thousand kilometers away from it. The kinetic
slugs, short range missiles, and particle beams and lasers (if any) would start
flying from those defenders any second. Gellimand 3 spooled up its main engine
one last time, but it didn't go into evasive gyrations. It needed a stable
launching platform. After it had fired its nose launcher a little over 5 hours
ago, it had loaded a second round and begun heating it. Now, it pointed its
nose directly at the space station 1.1 million kilometers away, and opened the
nose bay door. One last check of the field integrity on board the slug, the
"programmed" target selection, and the charge state of the capacitors, and
. . . launch! The giant slug launcher buried in Gellimand 3's
nose heaved its cargo forward at millions of g, jerking the whole
fighter backward as its mountings strained against the kick.

For the second time since it arrived in Sol space, a slug from Gellimand 3's
experimental Liquid Metal Gun was on its way.

Standard tactical doctrine at this point called for Gellimand 3 to commence
evasive maneuvers, in the slim hope of dodging the incoming fire from its
attackers. But against the massed fire of 17 onrushing fighters, the odds of
survival were just too low. Instead, it nudged its course until it hurtled
directly toward the same station that was its Liquid Metal Gun's target —
or, rather, at the orbital position the station would occupy when Gellimand 3's
remains arrived. If any of those incoming fighters were sporting a magnetic
snare, it would certainly try to knock Gellimand 3 off course; but if not, and
if for whatever reason Station Jove didn't get out of the way, well over a
hundred thousand tonnes of steel and fuel would hit the station at two percent
of light speed.

In concert, the seventeen Sol fighters throttled way back from their
100g intercept cruise, and every short-range missile they carried
erupted from its silo. The tiny blue-white flames of their miniature hot-fusion
engines overwhelmed Gellimand 3's thermal sensors with more targets than it
could track. It was an unnecessary overkill. Gellimand 3 didn't even try to get
out of the way. Its point-defense proton cannons lay still; there was no point
in knocking out the missiles' guidance systems if no evasive maneuvers were in
the works. The first missile struck dead center on one side, slamming through
sixty meters of spacecraft and emerging out the far side hardly slower than
when it entered. The tiny portion of its speed that had been robbed
during the impact, though, represented as much energy as a small nuke. The
internal shockwave propagated through the megapressurized liquid-metallic
hydrogen and deuterium in both of Gellimand 3's enormous internal fuel tanks,
bursting fuel lines and crushing most of the engine assembly. A wide blast of
molten and vaporized steel erupted from the gaping exit wound, then liquid fuel
from the internal tanks gushed out faster than it could evaporate. Cruelly, the
cone-shaped impact wave missed the S.I.'s central brain, forcing the doomed
fighter to watch as a second and a third missile tore through and left it
progressively more gutted. Finally, the fourth missile delivered the coup de
grace, and Gellimand 3 went from semi-intelligent weapons platform to small
metallic asteroid.

The remaining missiles continued to batter away at the lifeless hulk, turning
it into an ever-more-ragged cloud of hot shrapnel.

There was nothing the Sol fighters could do, though, about the tiny white-hot
molten streak speeding away behind them toward Station Jove.

"That's a kill," Major Ragaji reported from the tactical board.

"About time," the Brigadier General grunted. "Did the fighters nudge the hulk
onto a safe trajectory?"

"Yes sir," Ragaji studied his board, "But ... uh oh. Sir? I think the intruder
managed to squeeze off a round from that slug missile launcher of theirs. We've
got an unidentified blip pulling ahead of the intruder's debris cloud, headed
straight for us at . . . good lord, at thirty-five permil
relative! That puts its E.T.E. at only one and three-quarter minutes."

"Samuels?" the Brigadier General addressed his main weapons station with
trepidation.

Major Samuels breathed a few nervous gasps. "No dice, I couldn't find any
contingency plans for high-speed missile launches. Guess we'll just have to
hammer at it with point defense like any other missile, and try to move out of
the way as best we can." Inwardly, Samuels wished he were wearing a space suit.
Even a standard-sized slug could tear a hole in their compartment big enough to
let all the air out, and that monster projectile bearing down on them was a
hell of a lot bigger than a standard slug. But those damned compression suits
squeezed so hard around their wearer's hands as to make even typing an uphill
chore, and Sol's military long ago decided that the lost utility wasn't worth
the added margin of decompression safety. Of course, the people that had made
that decision were back on Earth's surface, shielded safely below a miles-thick
layer of omnipresent air that was never in any danger of draining away into
space.

"All right then," the Brigadier General declared. "Samuels, lock our P.D.
cannons on the target and fire the instant it's in short weapons range.
Tactical, spool us up and put us on evasive, do everything you can to move us
out of its path. Sergeant," he turned to the curly-haired North Martian youth,
"Sound evasive alert!"

"Yes sir!" Sergeant Li snapped crisply, strapping herself to her station and
hitting a new klaxon as she keyed her mike. "All personnel, thrusters engaging!
Random thrust in five seconds!"

Spanning the entire orbiting framework that was Station Jove, a network of
electric arc-jets blossomed to life, throwing propellant first in one
direction, then another. Their combined thrust amounted to less than a tenth of
a gee, but it was enough to get the station moving.

Now secured to the tactical station with foot and torso straps, Major Ragaji
watched the display and shook his head. "Just like their reports said, sir. The
object's correcting course and homing in on us."

Samuels looked hard at his displays. Could their short-range missiles lock onto
something that small? It was certainly a bright enough thermal target, and he
doubted it could do much in the way of evasive maneuvering. He selected the
target, tripped the firing safety, and pressed the buttons. Somewhere on the
other side of Station Jove, two magnetic launch tubes gently nudged their
cargoes clear of the station — "gentle" being a relative term for the
100g imparted to the two missiles — and four-and-a-half seconds
later, two tiny proton-deuteron rocket-motors lit off. "Missiles away! The
target'll only be a few seconds away by the time they hit, sir. We'll try our
luck with point defense and snares in the meanwhile."

He watched the distance plummet, like a skydiver whose parachute wouldn't open.

"Firing!" Samuels barked. Instantly, the tiny hypervelocity guns bristling the
Station's hull began spitting out their miniature slugs, all trained on the
small but bright target now only 300 000 kilometers away. The rod of
molten iron had cooled a bit in the minute-or-so since its launch, and now
glowed only a dull yellow-white hot, but it was still intensely bright in the
infrared; only the rocket motors of their outrushing missiles were brighter.
The point-defense guns had no trouble pinpointing the target, leading it just
the right amount — Samuels had been right, the Liquid Metal gunbolt had
neither the ability nor the inkling to dodge incoming fire — and as such
the station's point-defense guns scored their longest-ranged direct hits on
record.

But the molten intruder kept tracking them.

"How?!" Samuels' hands shook. "Those were solid hits! How could it still be
homing in on us?!"

"Dammit!" Samuels muttered. "Lasers!" He flipped a few more controls, and
gigawatts of coherent power lanced invisibly through space to meet the threat,
now barely more than 200 000 kilometers away. The distant glow brightened,
the peak blackbody frequency shifted higher, but —

"It's still correcting course!" Ragaji reported.

"The lasers only made it hotter," Samuels shook his head. "Closer to its
temperature when we first detected it."

"If you heat it all the way to a vapor, would that knock it out?"

"Our lasers would overheat before we could pump that much radiation into
it," Samuels answered. He glanced at his targeting display. "Coming up on snare
range . . ." He checked the magnetic snare's status, and the target.
"Whoa!"

"Hm?"

"There's a magnetic anomaly reading coming from the slug! I didn't
notice 'til our snare locked on target just now. That's how the slug's
tracking us! It's a magnetic lock! It's got us in a really long, steady
magnetic snare!"

"How's that even possible? You said it was too hot to be ferromagnetic."

"You don't need to be magnetic to generate a snare. But that's the
longest damn snare I've ever seen. Probably too weak at extreme range
for our detectors, which is why our snare alarm didn't go off. Let's see how it
likes a dose of its own medicine. Snare 3 firing!"

A multimegatesla magnetic jolt surged outward from one of the Station's
emitters and, a third of a second later, passed over and around the liquid iron
bolt like a gentle breeze.

". . . Was that a hit?" Major Ragaji puzzled, staring at the tactical
board.

Samuels checked the return signal. "Yes."

"Then it's no good. It's still tracking us."

Sergeant Li heard this last piece of bad news, then looked at the time and
distance remaining. Gasping, she keyed her mike. "All personnel, brace for
impact!"

Samuels nervously bit his finger. "It'll hit our missiles half a second
before it gets here. Can the thrusters get us out of the way in time?"

A scant five thousand kilometers away — the last half-second of the
slug's journey — solid steel met molten iron. The liquid metal splashed
and flowed around the projectile, reforming itself on the other side as though
nothing had happened. The second missile likewise passed right through its
target, its speed hardly changed at all. Had they posessed explosive warheads
that detonated on impact, they might have been able to blow the gunbolt
apart from the inside and disrupt its magnetic lock; even its Centaurian
designers weren't sure. But these were the kinetic missiles that Sol had come
to rely on so well for their anti-spacecraft arsenal. They relied on speed, and
speed alone, to hit the enemy hard enough to break its back. A molten target
simply didn't have a back to break.

There wasn't enough time to tell that the missiles had failed. Station impact
happened first.

At thirty-five permil — 10 500 kilometers per second — it
didn't matter that the impactor was molten. A solid iron battering ram or
a blast of iron vapor would have had the same effect. The midsection
holding the station together disintegrated, its armor pushed aside faster than
the metal could even crumple. As the slug slammed deeper into the
station's support structures, it slowed, and the lost kinetic energy became
heat. Metal, ceramic, and organics all turned to liquid, then
vapor, then plasma, as the impact spalled out the far side.

Station Jove was cut cleanly in half.

The station's thrusters ceased instantly as the jolt whipped through both
halves of Cape Jovial. Sergeant Li lost her grip on her station and rotated
backward as the floor — or was this the wall? — flew up to meet
her. She yanked herself back into position and read the monitor. "We've lost
data feed from sections 54 onward! Switching to internal radio comm."

"Damage report!" the Brigadier General barked.

"Sections 54 through 65 are dark," Sergeant Li read from her display. "Sections
50, 51, 68, and 70 are completely breached, reading vacuum. She winced at the
thought of any crew who were in those sections when they blew open. "Some
nearby sections show pressure leaks; looks like patch crews've been notified."
She gasped slightly as she read: "The whole block from section 100 through 125
is on emergency power." Sergeant Duane Yu, the boyfriend who'd followed her
here from North Mars, was usually stationed in section 116.

"How's our ops status?" the General turned to his other staff.

"Tactical's still up, sir" Ragaji told him.

"Thrusters are out," Samuels reported, "Both halves."

"Section 84's reporting electrical failure," Li continued. Section 84 was one
big QC&C reactor, responsible for powering a large chunk of the station. "The
impact must've caused a feedback surge."

As the Brigadier General absorbed the damage reports one by one, his head
reeled. This was bad, ad not just for Station Jove. The Centaurians had
managed to build a guidance system that could survive the girder-crushing
acceleration of a mass driver launch, and which couldn't be shot down by
point-defense systems. A guided kinetic slug. How could any Sol fleet
possibly stand up to an enemy so armed?

"Uh ... sir?" Ragaji broke in. "We've got another problem. Our fighters did a
little too well on the intruder."

"Hm?" the General grunted.

"It put itself on a collision course with us just before we killed it," the
Major explained. "The main bulk of it's been safed, so it'll miss us —
but our fighters' weapons must have blasted away some pretty significant chunks
of it. There's a cloud of expanding debris racing alongside its original
collision trajectory at the same 20 permil relative, and we're in its way."

"And we don't have thrusters?!" the General turned to Samuels in alarm.

"N-n-no, sir!" Samuels was at the brink of panic.

"Forty-five seconds 'til the shrapnel arrives," Ragaji noted.

"Are any of our snares still working?" the General asked.

Samuels scanned his readouts, hands shaking uncontrollably, then stammered,
"We've got three undamaged, but none of 'em have power."

The General snorted. "Options!"

"Uh ..." Samuels tried desperately to regain his cool, scanning his panels for
anything they could use. "Field!" He switched on the station's magnetic field,
the same charged-particle protection every fighter and carrier sported.
"Field's still working!"

The General growled, "That'll only deflect the little sand-grain-sized pieces.
What can we do about the bigger chunks? And the non-ferrous debris?"

"Uh oh," Samuels continued. "The field's only up on our half. The e-mags on the
other half of the station aren't responding."

The General sighed. "All right. Sergeant," he addressed Li, "Order the crew to
minimum cross-section."

Sergeant Li's eyes bugged wide. She knew what it meant. More of the crew would
be dead very soon. Hand shaking, she grabbed her mike and keyed it. "All
personnel, minimum cross-section. High-speed shrapnel impact is imminent.
Straighten your body with your head or your feet pointing right at
Jupiter."

"Twenty seconds," Ragaji intoned, swinging his torso around while holding onto
the tactical station's handles. There was no protective gear to don, no
crash station to brace against. Nothing onboard was anywhere near thick
enough to stop a 20 permil fragment. If his body happened to lie along
the path of one of those speeding bullets, he wouldn't live long enough to
notice.

"Ten seconds." The countdown seemed to last an eternity.

. . . Impact.

It was like a shotgun blast. One instant, all was intact; the next, every
section of Station Jove was riddled with punch-holes. Automatic alarms blared
as air hissed out through legions of tiny hull breaches. The other half of the
station had it far worse. With no magnetic deflection field to protect it, the
high-numbered sections of Station Jove bore the full brunt of the countless
microfragment grains filling the debris cloud. Some sections were hit lightly
enough that their whipple shields could absorb all the energy; others turned
into a grotesque charicature of Swiss cheese; still others simply
disintegrated.

The main mass of the enemy hulk, one hundred sixty-four thousand tonnes of
metal and now-gaseous fuel, passed harmlessly by and slammed into Jupiter. At
the point of Jovian impact, a tiny pinpoint of light erupted. It spread, and as
it spread it darkened, until an enormous black disc of cratered Jovian
atmosphere the size of Mercury bruised the surface.

A few hours later, the winds of Jupiter had erased this blemish from the
planet's face, as though nothing had happened.